The Gallery
by Unfinishedsenten
Summary: Five villains. Five plans to destroy the city and the Bat. Five tragic pasts. Only one chance for redemption? You'll see.


**PART 1: LIFE AT ARKHAM**

Chapter 1: Five Invitations

1\. _Harvey Dent fights back_

* * *

Hey, you!

Come over here, I want to show you something.

It's pretty neat.

What?

Oh, no.

No, not _you:_ the Invisible Man standing a little to your left.

Yes, you!

Who do you think I'm talking to?

Come on, hurry up! It'll only take a minute. Less than that: a second! Just a teensy little second for you to get a quick peek at this thing over here, then you can turn right around and get back to whatever it is you were supposed to be doing before I interrupted.

Come on, it's _neat._ You think I'd waste your time showing you something that wasn't? You're a busy person, aren't you?

Yeah, of course you are!

You know I wouldn't be yanking your leg, or anything. Of course not! I don't even _know_ you.

So get your butt over here already!

There you go. Only'll take a second. What's that? Oh, yeah, it's right here, right next to the serving station. _In_ the serving station, actually; it's apart of the food selection. See, here's your hot dogs, your chicken nuggets, your carrots, your celery sticks, your stale buns of buttermilk bread that'll crumble to dust as soon as you touch them, those square, eight-ounce milk cartons you probably drank yourself back in school, your mashed potatoes… and then… _then!_... there's _that_ thing.

That major, molten monstrosity.

Sure is the looker, I'd say, except my mother taught me that sarcasm is the refugee of prudes and half-wits. And the truth here is, un-sarcastically speaking, that stuff looks like something that got infected, got sick, got _dead_ , crawled back out of its grave, climbed onto that food pan there, died again, burst open, liquefied, and is now being eaten up by a bunch of filthy red maggots.

You see, whenever a patient in this place cuts up, or does something real nasty, something _real_ perverted, or does anything at all to piss off one of the staff members—and by staff members I mean the guards, mostly—they get _that_ for lunch. Now, I'm sure most of them have had worse before, at some point in their colorful lives; hell, some people in this booby hatch, they're actual _cannibals_ , so I imagine a great big culinary eyesore like this one just rolls right off the ole shoulder whenever _they_ see it. But still…

Yeesh.

It's cool.

 _Neat_.

But still…

Yeesh.

I mean, even the guys who _haven't_ misbehaved as of late feel their stomachs flip and flop and fail whenever they scoot past it in the lunch line; the way it just festers there, some of it spilled over the edge of the pan, its color and consistency like something of which the Predator would throw up…it's all but horrifying.

No, that's a lie.

It _is_ horrifying, hook, line, and sinker.

 _Plop!_ goes the ladle-full of that festering brown puddle onto your hard-plastic tray when it's time to dine, _squish!_ goes your gorge as you dare to take a whiff, and _poof!_ goes your entire appetite as you dare yourself even farther to take a sip. That is, of course, if your entire appetite isn't already rendered inoperable by the sight of the art-house horror in the first place.

Go on, lean over the breath-guard and give it a sniff. If smells are ever any indication of taste, then the foul odor this thing puts out is almost dead-on; a single whiff will confide in you that it's really liquid death in a bowl, and a single jab of the tongue will tell you that, no, actually, it's only liquid _shit_ in a bowl.

Not that it makes any real difference _what_ it is; if you have a normal food tolerance, you'll end up tossing your little plastic spoon back onto your tray and pushing the latter out as far as your disgusted, slightly shaking hands can slide it.

I mean, it's not like the carrot-stick approach ever really works in here, anyway. The patients… well, they're the apotheosis of sick, you know? The white-collar executives on the upper floor of screaming, snarling mad; the top-rung-steppers of torturous, implacable mental agony. Do they really think—do they really _believe_ —that any naughty-kids-only-get-a-lump-coal type of government here is suddenly going to stop all the outbursts of violence and distressing emotional states?

Does the majority of the legislature on Gotham City's Department of Mental Health and Hygiene _r_ _eally_ believe that these patients—the patients whose overall population add up to a pretty considerable percentage of cannibals, mind you—will stop and think, "Oh, wait a second, maybe I _shouldn't_ perforate this poor orderly's throat with this piece of electrical wire I managed to wiggle free from that crack in my cell wall, because, after all, if I _do,_ I'm bound to miss out on a nice, solid meal come lunch-time"? I don't know about you, but I think the fluctuations of the mentally ill are a little more _delicate_ than that.

Ah, but now I'm just ranting.

Sorry.

I just don't…

Look, all the only other thing I'll say on the subject is… this stuff here is actually a pretty good indication of what this place is like, when you get down to it. Filthy, sloppy, ugly, made up of a bunch of nasty ingredients, per cup, per ounce. Like the stuff on that pan there, Arkham is a rather pointless punishment for those who misbehave and little else.

I suppose it'd make you wonder if any of the patients can actually ever be fixed up, if they were for once in their lives placed in the right hands.

In caring, attentive hands.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

I don't know.

But I _do_ know that they despise this stuff just as much as they do their big, rusted homes. They should, too; I mean, just look at it. Jesus, if I were in here on the night of the food fight, and if _I_ were Eric Coulter, I would've tired swinging some of it at Harvey Dent's face, too; in a scrap like that one, almost anything goes, and God knows the pungent smell is enough to knock you flat on your butt, even at this distance, let alone when it's being swung right at your face.

What's that?

You don't know about the food fight?

Yeah, of course there was a fight! Near the end of the year. And right after that, there was the riot.

You know about the riot, at least?

…

How?

How did you miss _that_? Geez, where you been staying lately, under a rock? Under a rock on the _moon_?

Well, no, you know what?

I take that back.

This is not surprising in the slightest. In Gotham's ever expansive stockpile of press outlets—be it those mere bulletin articles on the web, or any sort of on-site coverage—the mechanics of how all the shitstorms that go over in here begin to spin are rarely ever communicated. And when they do, it's bound to be quick and terse, just the salient points; just a quick little warning that, oh, whoops, the inmates of this creepy, Transylvanian-looking loony-bin have decided to up and leave their cells _yet_ again; looks like they left a couple of dead folks behind them as they ran out, exploding this here and that over there, no doubt wondering about in your local alleyways and sewer systems as we speak; what a shame; let's just hope you can sleep with your eyes open tonight, folks—and every night until they're apprehended again—because you just never know who they might come after next, amiright?

Ok, ok, I admit, that's a little dramatic.

But, more or less, that's what it's like for the little sheep of this city: no one ever gets the full story. Not unless they're involved somehow, and even then…

Ok, _I'll_ tell you. Why not? I have nothing exactly clogging up my schedule for the day; I don't even _have_ a schedule. I won't leave anything out, either; I'll give you all the nitty-gritties; all the painful, honest stuff the news likes to dump in a vat of boiling tar and roll through a bed of feathers to hide what it really is, how things _really_ are.

Not that _I_ know how things really are, though. Oh no. No one does. We just have what we're given and all we can do is go off that, right?

The news though… it likes to cover up _that_ fact, too.

So I promise you right here, right now, that I won't spare you any of the details of this story—at least not any that I'm personally aware of. No matter how horrible they are, ok? Since I'm the only one who knows what happened and what the people who it happened to _felt_ about it, I'll do that for you. Someone should know, I think. More importantly, someone should _see_.

See _what_ , you ask?

You'll see.

At least…

I hope you will.

I know, I know, I might as well be speaking in pig Latin.

Here, take a seat on one of these bench-stools. Kick back while you're at it, we might be here awhile. Oh, wait a minute! What about that thing you were supposed to be doing?

Oh?

Oh, good, so you've got some time to kill.

Alright, about twenty minutes should give me enough time to tell you about my old friend Harvey Dent. Or, as I call him, ole hangin' Harv.

I call him _hangin'_ Harv because… well, you'll see that, too. It's towards the end of what I know, anyway.

To open on the rough, beaten-down-and-kicked-away path that was his life, I'll tell you about the mess hall scuffle first. That's a good place to start, I think. We'll just see where it goes.

So, you know what I said about the dead-looking puddle stuff being served to the patients who misbehaved, and only to those patients? Well, on that night—it was late October, crisp outside, slow inside, very SOP, and all the male patients had just gotten in for their nine o' clock diners before they'd no doubt walk back out the doors in their single-file lines and either request to head off to the rec room so they'd shuffle around and see what sort of a board-game or child's coloring book they could fiddle with for the thousandth or so time, or retire to their isolation cells for the usual night of sweaty sheets, surly grunts, and soon-to-be-forgotten nightmares—there actually ended up being as many servings of that junk as there are white cloaks and cone-tipped hats at a KKK assembly. Everywhere you looked, someone had a puddle of it dumped onto their trays. In other words, pretty much _everyone_ misbehaved.

That's right.

If someone hadn't cheeked their meds, then they banged on the fiber-glass doors of their cells and screamed that they needed to be let out because the bomb in their necks was about to go off, or because the aliens would soon come down and probe them or whatever; if they didn't jerk off constantly, or intentionally riled-up other patients into emotional breakdowns, they tried to stab their psychiatrists with the ballpoint pens the good doctors were using to scribble down notes during patient interviews.

Harvey Dent had turned out to have done the latter when he sat down on one of these stools, tray in hand, vomit-looking stuff before him.

There's a couple of things you should know about Dent:

First, while he was a patient here, he never said much. Not to the doctors he tried to stab with ballpoint pens because his coin told him to; not to any fellow patient who would take a break from obsessively scratching his legs or yanking out big fistfuls of bloody head-hair from his scalp and ask him a question, or, hell, even try to befriend him—because his reputation presided him, this was rare. In fact, he could go a whole day without saying a single word outside those interviews… and sometimes he didn't even talk _then_ , either. You'll find this to be the case with most of the other big names—they'll monologue and pick nits and shoot the breeze for hours on end when they're standing with hostage in the nook of their elbow and the nuzzle of a gun pressed against the latter's head, or when they've hijacked the radio frequencies or television channels, but in here, when they're forcibly condescended with the rest of the loons, they tend to keep their mouths good and shut. Sure, at first, they might backlash and curl up into a ball and scream and fight the system— _try_ to fight the system, at least—but after awhile they all get used to these ever-so humble surroundings. And, after awhile, they're just another loon, no matter _how_ big their names are.

Harvey never answered his fellow patients' questions and the guards never goofed around with any unnecessary conversational gambit when they gave him orders. I mean, they beat on him—patient-beating was the sport of the day for Arkham security, the way golf is for old country-club members—but even then there wasn't much talking; just the occasional bellowed insult, the chuckling as their batons fell with a hard thump against his back, his ribs, his head, and, of course, the grunts and gasps and cries.

Not that Harvey ever cried for help, you see; he cried sometimes, from the pain, but never to beg mercy.

No, like I said, aside from the patient interviews, Harvey seldom ever had any real verbal interaction here at Arkham.

So it stands to reason that when he sat down to eat his meal that night, he sat down to eat his meal _alone_.

Second—and you may already know this from the mug-shots on the news, which is something they always _do_ seem to show, at least—but Harvey was horribly, seriously deformed. I'm talking a _baaad_ deformation. The whole left side of his face was pretty much gone; it had gone from handsome and rakish to an ugly, wrinkled, snarling cross between the face of one of those anatomy posters back in school and the torn remains of a mummy after a cat has set to work on clawing away his rolls of bandage. The tattered bandages, in this case, were Harvey's exposed tendons. His hair had been sizzled off to the root, and there were a couple of piebald patches of red and black flesh on his dome. The left corner of his mouth had been expanded a couple of inches, opening his cheek so that his yellow teeth and the soft hump of his tongue peeked out for all the world to see. This was the aftermath of something that had happened when he was district attorney: after about one too many racketeering busts for his liking, a mobster by the name of Carmine Falcone strapped him to a table and personally tipped over a jug of acid onto his face. I'll get into that if we have time to spare, but for now just know that if there was ever a watershed moment in Harvey's life, that was it. It happened at a point in his mental deterioration where, after the scarring, he was all set to believe that the new wasteland of his left-hand profile was more raw _meat_ than raw _muscle_.

Meat as in the meat of his soul, you see; the raw, red meat of the angry thing waiting inside. He kept picturing someone sticking a putty knife in the wedge where a facing of wallpaper meets the baseboard and then using it to slowly pull the paper back, exposing the dark stains, and mold spots, and gouges underneath. Exposing the evil man there, who had been waiting underneath all along. Which leads me to the third thing to know:

There was a bad side to Harvey Dent.

"Bad Harv," as Harvey called him. Bad Harv was the man who used to lived only on the _inside_ and then had been set free—or _halfway_ free, at least—after the acid incident.

You should know that it wasn't spilt personality disorder; I believe that's a very important fact to be aware of. Harvey never blacked out. There was no disassociation, no sudden loss of memory or self. Don't you start getting anyway images of a flip door or anything, ok? If it _was_ like that—if it was some sort of weird Dr. Jekyll/ Mr. Hyde deal—things would've been a hell of a lot simpler… not to mention more manageable. People who like to dab in the always pleasant, degree-free art of armchair psychiatry will often get that confused about guys like Harv; they'll assign them—in their heads at least—as sufferers of Dissociative Identity Disorder, because it's easier to believe than the naked, ugly truth. People'll take one look at Harvey and expect _him_ to have two sides to _his_ coin, too, like his face, like his coin itself. That's only rational; if it looks like a monkey, and acts like a monkey, and all that. But the truth is, the ugly truth is, Harvey was just angry a lot.

And sometimes that anger was uncontrollable.

What he got angry about varied and varied vastly. Sometimes it could be little stuff that set his heart over the mountain; it could be a tedious pre-trial hearing, a desperate, spittle-spraying insult from one of Carmine's men as Harvey ripped him to shreds in the courtroom, or even a rip in the new suit. Little pestering stuff like that, it didn't matter: he still felt his blood go up and a growl build up around the interior edges of his throat. With every stubborn jury or maddeningly equivocating medical examiner who shrugged off his questions in the morgue and asked his _own_ questions—questions that he already knew the answers to because _he_ was the medical examiner—Harvey's heart rapped against his chest like a knuckle beating away a tune. Excuse me if I _wax poetic_ here for a second, but it was like some inner pool of lava in the chambers of his being, building up and up, threatening to erupt if he didn't clear his head or step away from whatever it was that was ticking him off. And then, when it was the big stuff, when a client's withheld information was piling up like the world's fastest growing case-clincher on his desk's blotter, the lava inside would begin to climb and his face might even change—even then it changed, changed from handsome and rakish to downright ugly and prodded. The second face at those times of day was the face of Bad Harv; the face of the lava slopping over the edge; the face of the red meat seeping up through the cracks.

And the problem, you see, was Harvey's conflicting conscience.

I guess you could call it the voice in the back of his head that questioned everything; I guess you could say he was naïve in his indecisiveness; I guess you could say he was a frequent habitué of that fence separating those two sides of lawn; those two sides of lawn he was never quite sure of which he should fall over onto, for fear that the one he _did_ chose would end up breaking his neck. At any rate, no matter how you put it, he was always just paranoid. The lave would threaten eruption and he would instantly hound himself over all the metaphorical cities it could destroy under its huge, leathery gulf, and the villagers it could harm, and even the potential harm it could do to itself—he would start to think of the instant shame and humiliation and pain that was sure to follow if he were to explode.

Then the lava would start to recede agreeably.

Then the medical examiner would ask another obnoxiously rhetorical question, or Harvey would discover another irrevocably existent piece of evidence to add to that case-clincher on his desk and it all would start to rise again.

This ebb and flow of his self-control didn't just happen when he was angry, though; it seemed like most of the time he was on that fence, tilting back and forth between those two sides of lawn. He didn't know which route in life would end up scurrying his ass right out of office, or onto the national news, or worse. Have you ever seen the Princess Bride? You know that scene where the short fat guy, the one who kidnaps the princess in the beginning of the movie, is going back and forth between those poisoned chalices, going on and on for what seems like forever, saying stuff like, "Since you knew I wouldn't drink the one closest to me, since I'm so-and-so, it must be the one closest to _you_ that's poisoned. But, see, since you obviously knew I'd figure that out when you first set the drinks down, since you _know_ I'm so-and-so, it has to be the one closet to _me_ that's poisoned. But, a-ha, since you know I'd figure that out, too, it must be the one closest to _you_ that's poisoned. But since…" and so on?

That was like Harvey, at night.

 _It isn't fair_ , he'd think to himself, in bed; he'd be beside his wife, feeling her warm and slender body curled up against him under the covers, one of his arms under his pillow, his eyes staring up at the burring, whirling ceiling fan. _Jesus, it just isn't. How many possibilities are there? How many chances do we get to have a great, normal life, and how often do we screw it up? Everything's fine now, sure, I've wound up on my feet, I'm doing alright, doing what I'm pretty sure I love, doing what I'm pretty sure is in my_ bones _, and I've got this beauty here beside me, this extraordinary gift I don't deserve to have, but what if I fumble this up, or the next prosecution, or the next fucking hit to the book by those fat-cat bastards… it's like the belt. Goddamnit, it's like the belt. I just don't know what I've done for this to happen; I don't know_ what _I've done wrong, and I don't know how to_ fix _what I've done. God, this isn't fair. It just isn't. I thought I could do_ it—she _said I could do it; she practically held my hand and walked me up to ever single wobbly podium and little marble step of the courthouse, whispering in my ear how I could do it all the while, God knows—but I was an idiot to listen. Just a big, wet-eyed little idiot. Because she doesn't get it. Because she doesn't understand how fragile everything is. Face it, Harvey: you could've ducked out when you had the chance, you could've let the coin decide, but you chose to listen to_ her _instead and thumbed your only real friend in the world into that pond in the park and that was the_ wrong _choice and now… heh, well, now you've got a whole lot of chances to make up for it. In fact, now you've got all the chances to make up for it you could ever want._

Then he'd slap a hand over his face and utter a groan that he hoped—a little fearfully—was far back enough in his throat that it didn't wake up Gilda. And when he found out that it hadn't woken her up, he'd groan again, this time inside his head.

 _But how do I fucking_ know _?_ he'd think. _How do I know what's the right way? They say just live life, but so many people 'just live life' and look where they end up. Look where so many of Gotham's 'heroes' end up. I could ask Gilda, tell her about the case, give her the gist of it, the borderline choice of the thing, I could ask her like I did when I started to run, when I wasn't sure if I_ should _run, have her be my coin, but then… God, then all our work—all_ her _work, her work on me, helping me get better—will be for nothing. No, I need to see this through on my own. I know that. I need to… God, I need see Dr. Dumound and tell him the pills aren't working. I'm just as obsessive as ever. But… what if_ that's _the wrong call, too? What if going to see him… Oh, fuck, what if thinking about this all is wrong, too, Harvey? What if having thoughts in general is wrong? What if taking a leak in the middle of the night is wrong; maybe you should just hold it in, perhaps? What if eating or drinking or driving to work in the morning or getting up at all, or even breathing air is wrong? You know how utterly absurd—not to mention insane—you sound, harping on like this. Just_ choose. _What's that old saying: what is meant to happen will happen? Yeah, follow that. Live by that._

Then, again, he'd groan inside his head. _But how do I_ **know** _if I should follow that? How do I… oh Christ, this just isn't fucking fair!_

Well, if he was wrong about one thing, he was wrong about Gilda.

Gilda could've helped him through it.

She _always_ could've.

And, come whatever, she would always _try_.

She would've told him, if she had known how bad it was—like she had told him before when it was just that bad—that what _she_ would choose in that situation was to believe in him and _his_ choices, and that whatever he did decide, well… well, she just knew it'd be the right decision, if only because _he_ was _her_ right decision, all those years before. She knew that when they made good on their promise to go to those swing-dance classes (they were young, carefree, new to the city, looking for a hobby, and she had wanted to do the Lindy Hop with her own man ever since Mommy had sat her down and told her the story of how she met Daddy), she would end up wanting to dance with him for the rest of her life, if she was so able. She would've told him to remember those classes, and that grin on his face as they had started to ease into the dance after all those weeks—those long weeks of fun but still utterly exhausting practice.

She'd tell him to think of how they were _finally_ getting it right, _finally_ getting into the rhythm, _finally_ responding off the other's movements with all the natural liquidity of the music playing in the background. She'd tell him to think of how happy he felt about that, how free he was, how fast the dance really was, when the professionals did it, but how awfully slow _they_ had been doing it up until then. She'd tell him to think of how great it he said it was to be able to finally do the thing fast. She'd tell him that, in those dances, in all those flips and dips and turn-outs and finger-snaps, he wasn't choosing anything. He was just _being_. And if anything should happen, if anything remotely negative should come of his decisions, he should always know that—like in all those rapid step-step tuck turns—she'd be there with him, going through the motions with him.

 _Being_ with him.

She'd be with him and trust in him and believe in him like no one ever could.

She'd tell him she wouldn't be his coin. No, she'd just be—she'd _always_ just be—the girl who had made him throw his coin away, because he didn't need it anymore.

If Harvey had asked, all that would've made it easier to deicide, I think.

But, then again, how was he to know if he _should've_ asked?

You see how much of a ticking time bomb he was then?

Well, it was no better the night of the cafeteria riot. That was after the acid accident, after he exploded.

As he was _that_ night, you could've offered him your most puzzling conundrum, your stickiest wicket, you own snarled-up Gordian Knot… you could've asked him all those questions he asked himself not only _that_ night in bed, but so many nights in bed before and after that… and _still_ he would tell you to go with the coin. If you had one to use, use it, he'd say. And don't fight what side comes up.

It was, after all, not a question of why.

It was a question of _why not_.

Why _wouldn't_ it be heads instead of tails, he'd ask you now. Why would God—if there is such a knowledgeable being out there—decide to show us one rather than the other, if the one we were seeing wasn't the side we were _supposed_ to see? It's a matter of a fifty percent chance, after all. Surely it wouldn't be too much to let someone see a sliver Washington instead of a sliver eagle unfurling its wings; surely one wouldn't have to look too awfully hard for a sign of a go-between then; surely that's a quite in-your-face communication between the little rascals here on Earth and whoever created our life. Surely the two sides of the coin are the simplest things there are.

So why not?

All Harvey's life, the life he led before the explosion, before the cataclysmic eruption that leveled so many of his cities, _whys_ and _whats_ and _how comes_ wouldplague him when bad things started in. When he was sitting in his D.A. office, getting overwhelmed, his tie pulled down and sweat on his face, he had asked why. When his father bent him over the bed at night, unbuckled his belt, flipped his _own_ coin to decide if Harvey should get off Scott-free or go to bed crying and perhaps even bleeding, and then pulled his belt free and whipped it across his son's bare ass—that was what the belt thing was about, by the way—even though Harvey could think of nothing he had done wrong recently, he had asked why. When Johnny Tanner from school cut across the tarmac of Oakland Street—he had tracked Dent ever since leaving the junior high building; Johnny jerked behind an occasional tree or dropped to his knees behind an occasional yew hedge whenever he thought Dent was turning and was about to spot him, but other than that it had been a safe and easy pursuit—and tackled him, punched him, split open his upper lip, raked his backpack away, and disgorged his one binder, one notebook, and couple of schoolbooks into the mouth of a gutter, he had asked why.

When Dad stripped him of his blood-splotched shirt that evening with a harsh upward yank and held it in front of his face, screaming at him to look at it, to look at that ruined shirt which had cost him actual _money_ to buy, like a pet-owner who might bring a dog's snout up close and personal to its most recent no-no, he had asked why this was happening, and what in God's name he'd done to deserve it.

Because none of those things were _fair_.

They really weren't.

But I ask you on behalf of Mr. Dent: what could more fair than a fifty percent chance?

He had been flipping his coin that night, right before Eric Coulter had reached out and snatched it, mid-air. That night he'd been trying to decide what he should eat first: mashed potatoes, the side-dish, or the main meal, the hot dog. Small stuff like that—like taking a leak in the middle of the night—was always in need of a toss during the first few months of his returned stay at Arkham.

Because that was always when things were the most unclear, the _most_ unfair. Either because the Bat shouldn't have been able to bust him that time, or shouldn't have been able to interfere, to gum up the works, or because the particular mercenary he had hired to eliminate a rival Mafioso or godfather or other had turn-coated for the person he was supposed to kill.

And he'd been having dreams about Gilda again, too.

And his father.

The ones with Gilda and him were almost too made-to-measure; a great, cozy suit that fit just right; one he never wanted to take off. In those dreams, they were dancing in the instructor's studio rental where they had gone to learn to swing-dance, along with the rest of the fresh, just-off-the-market couples. At first, in the dream, like in real-life, they were acting as if they had been dipped in molasses, going slowly through the motions because they were still learning the moves; her twirling ever-so slowly; him shuffling to the sides just as robotically. Then, they'd look into each others eyes, and he'd see hers were soft, intelligent, sympathetic blue, each eye a magical orb that seemed to know every answer to every question, the way a coin does, you might say.

And then they'd start revving, cruising, her body starting to spin faster, her sweaty hair a whipping feather boa, her face a sweaty, shiny gleam, her protruding breasts hitching in and out with every quickening breath.

Then... they'd just slam the pedal down onto the floor-mat and take off, _flying_ through the motions, ramming straight into them, swinging all over the room, using up every square inch of the rental's parquet floor. He'd even flip her; he'd even fall back on the roll of his back and she'd even fall back on his upturned feet and he'd boost her into a backflip over his head. That was something not even the instructors could do… but course _they'd_ be out of the room by then.

By then, it'd be just them.

The ones about Richard Dent…you can probably guess those weren't as charming. Most of them were about the belt, with Harvey bent over the bed, taking a whipping. Some of them were about law school. And very few of them were about Dad's death. In those dreams, he was visiting him in the hospital again, under those bright fluorescent lights, hearing the equipment beep away every last second of the old man's life, gripping his calloused, vein-crumpled hand in his, leaning in close to hear his raspy last words.

Which were always, "This isn't me."

Harvey would rear back a little in his chair in this dream, moving away from the hot breath wheezing out of his father's mouth, confused, his brows furrowing.

"Who is it, then, Dad?" he would ask.

Then his father would suddenly speak in a perfectly clear register and look at his son. "You, son," he'd say. "This is you."

"No, Dad, I'm not the one with lung cancer."

"I'm not saying you're _me_. I know you're not the one who's dying. You're just the one who killed me."

"Dad!" Harvey would be shocked, hurt, angry. He'd let his father's hand fall from his, letting it dangle from the short guardrail of the hospital bed. "Why would you say something like that?"

"Because it's true."

His Dad would say this in an easy, matter-of-fact voice. His shoulders would go up in a weak, barely noticeable gesture that could have only been a shrug. "I _saw_ you," he'd go on. "I saw you all those times, Harv, and I knew it'd be you. Eventually, I knew it'd be you, son. And you know what?"

Harvey would still be shocked, but he would lean in to his father's mouth again, anyway, needing to hear this.

And Richard Dent would say:

"She did, too."

Then Harvey would frown, and pull back from his father, and sit back in his chair, and see his wife standing on the other side of the room, by the window, a large, gaping hole in her head, just above the right eye. Blood seeped from that awful, huge hole, had cascaded down that right eye—it looked like the smooth flesh there had been beaten in, caved in, like with a hammer or mallet, and he could see some bone shining through the caked fountain of blood—and saturated her blue sunflower dress. She looked at him lifelessly.

Then he'd wake up.

In fact, the morning of the fight, he'd been having that exact same dream. He'd wake up screaming, the sheets drenched and damp with sweat, his heartbeat in his eyes and fingertips and forehead. Before the guards could even realize what had happened, he'd be caressing his coin, feelings its impressions, moving his finger along the lines and contours, feeling the chipped places where the acid had once shaved the face away.

That would help calm him down.

Throughout the whole day, be it whether he should share an opinion in group therapy or let himself doze off during another showing of Forest Gump one of the nurses had shuttered into the VDR player of the rec room, he had flipped his coin, afraid of the landmine that was the immediate future.

That was the future was to him, you know: a landmine.

And he didn't want to misstep.

And then, at diner, Eric, who had been sitting silently and directly across him, had stolen his coin.

Stolen his crutch.

Stolen his only hope.

"Hey!" Harvey cried out. He jerked forward, trying to stop Eric's hand in his, but he was much too slow: Eric had swiped it, hid it away in a fist, then put that fist to his chest to keep it out of reach.

"Just what in the hell do you think you're doing?" Harvey asked. I don't have to tell you that this room is pretty big—you can see that already; if someone so desired, they could move as much as twelve of these long cafeteria tables into a vertical line across the floor, and still have enough room to put up a small, above-ground swimming pool at the end of the last table—and it's packed with inmates when dinner-time comes around, so you can imagine the noise that night…

But Eric heard him anyways.

As did the nearby patients.

Heads where already a-turning.

Eric was pinching the coin and holding it up like some dusted-off artifact into a beam of sunlight. He had this little twerpy smile on the corners of his mouth—that classic bully smile, you could call it. Eric's one of those guys who hopscotches the line between overgrown punk and full-blown, Lector-level sadist. One second he's calling you out on the toilet paper on the bottom of your shoe, the other he's proving that he's just conducted business with you with a pocket knife and the skin of your belly. The doctors will say a lot of things about that, dig into it, categorize and classify it until its as specific as a Japanese wrinkled tree-frog perched on a Cypress tree leaf in the Sinharaja Forest Reserve; they'll have an all-night bull session about his psyche and the root of his behavior problems; they'll dissect it like a frog; study it like a mid-term…

But what it boils is he just likes picking on people.

He just _loves_ getting a rise out of every John and Jane he sees.

And Harvey was prime turkey in that department, as you know.

"Who me?" Eric said, looking at him with his eyebrows raised, "Oh, I'm just getting a look at what all the fuss is about. You've been flipping this thing forever, it seems, and here I've been, just watching you. It's all you do, is flip it, and it's rather bizarre, so of course it's going to spark my curiosity. Say… is it true you plug this thing up your butthole at night to keep it safe?"—then, before Harvey could say anything—"Nah, probably not. Probably just some silly little rumor, right?"

"Give it back," Harvey growled at him, "If you know what's good for you—if you like your balls where they are, at least—you'll give me back my coin."

Eric stared at him, hefted it, making it bounce slightly up and down on his palm like Harvey had done himself so many times before.

"Ok," he said, decidedly enough, "But first… it's gonna cost you." He put out a hand. "Now, now, don't worry, I'm not asking for much—I wouldn't want to press someone who's as strapped as you are; as we _all_ are in this place, really. I'll be even willing to go as low as a crummy little copper penny. Whadda say, Mister Dent? Got any more spare change plugged up your smelly butthole?"

Eric balled the hand with the coin in it, leaned back, and chuckled. He was joined by a few others; the ones who weren't eating and who were finding this conversation just as funny as he was, that is.

"You know who I am," Harvey growled again. It wasn't a question. "You _know_ who you're messing."

"Sure do, "Eric said, shrugging, "You used to be D.A; the big cheese of Gotham's heroes in black and blue. I didn't vote for you, but the ex-wife did. She said you had a nice, friendly face. A face you could trust in. I told her I couldn't see it, but you know what? I do now!"

But this time he didn't take the time to chuckle at his own wit. He just leaned forward, his elbows meeting the table, and lightly tapped his finger on the surface of the table.

"But here's what I _don't_ know, Harvey, and what I can't for the life of me figure out."

He paused, his face genuinely puzzled, and then whispered, in a conspiratorial tone: "How do you _bathe_? I mean, God, it must hurt like hellfire, right? All that water hitting your…" he gestured to Harvey's face, "…yeah... I mean, it must just be unbearable; it must sting like none other. So how? Or… do you not? That would explain a lot, actually, if you didn't, but I don't believe it. The people here would never allow that, not to mention all the stink you'd be putting out. So how? How _does_ Harvey Dent take a shower? It's been bugging me for oh so long now."

In case you're wondering that yourself, the answer is he just gritted his teeth through the pain the first hundred or so times and after a while his burnt skin—or raw meat— seemed to just numb against the rushing water. But Harvey didn't tell him that.

He just said, "I'm going to count to three-"

"Three?" Eric asked, "I thought _twos_ were more your thing."

"I'm going to count to three, and if-"

"No, Harv. No, you're not. You're not going to count to or _do_ anything. Wanna know why?"—and then, again, before Dent could answer—"It's because you don't know if you _should_. After all, if what they say is true, you use this coin to plan out not just your every crime, but sometimes your every physical _action_. Hell, I'd bet you were going to use it just now to figure out what you should eat first for dinner." He held out his other hand. "Correct me if I'm wrong now."

Harvey didn't correct him.

He wasn't wrong.

And Harvey knew where he was going with this.

And he wasn't wrong.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Eric continued, "So… let _me_ tell _you_ what's gonna happen, alright? In a few seconds, I'm going to flip this coin. Your coin. It'll be to decide how we're gonna let this whole coin situation play out. If it lands tails up, you're gonna let me keep it. You're gonna shrug it off and tell yourself you'll get a new one and get back to your meal and start eating whatever the hell you like. You'll forget all about this. Water under the bridge. But— _but!_ —if it lands _heads_ up,"—Eric uncurled his fist. The coin turned in his fingers and he held up the burnt side. As he did, his eyes hardened, and, at first, he spoke very slowly—"then you're gonna leap across this table… and grab me by the throat… squeeze the life out of me… and take it from my cold, dead hands. I'll fight you—of course I'll fight you!—but you'll just fight me right back. If it'll lands heads up, you'll won't stop until I'm just _dead_. After all, the coin will be telling you to. The coin will have decided it."

He sat back.

"But I'm sure I don't have to tell _you_ that. So what do you say? Not that you have a choice, but still… what do you say, pal?"

Harvey licked his lips; he was angry, pissed off, but trapped.

"You don't get to tell me what to do," he said.

Eric smiled at that, but it wasn't the twerpy one he had worn while he was mocking him. It was a horrible, knowing, perverted-pleased smile.

"And neither do you," he said. "That's this thing's job. It's not me. It's the coin. And does it really matter who flips it? This side, this good side,"—the coin was held up to Harv again—"and this side, this bad side,"—the coin turned over in his fingers to the bad side—"those two will never change. You know that. You _know_ I'm right. So… I'll ask again: are you ready?"

Like the medical examiner from long ago, Eric's question wasn't really a question at all.

"Go ahead," Harvey said. He said it like a man who wanted to pretend he was in charge, but who knew he obviously wasn't.

And Harvey—as he himself knew—was _never_ in charge.

Not really.

"But if it's the bad side," he continued in that same, not-really-in-charge voice, "I'll rip your fucking throat out."

Eric's smile never faltered.

"I know," he said, "I can't wait."

Then coin climbed up to the nail of his thumb.

Eric shot it up into the air with a faint plink.

It landed onto his palm just as fast as it had flipped in the air.

Eric looked down, looked at it.

Looked up.

Smiled—Eric smiles a lot, doesn't he?

Then he held out his palm. He looked at Dent and Dent looked back at him and there was a strange moment of mutual understanding; a link between minds. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true. At that moment, they knew what the other guy was thinking. They really did.

The other patients knew it, too.

It's why they drew in their breath.

The fight started like this: Harvey did what he had been told to by his coin and jumped across the table, his hands reaching out for Eric's throat; then Eric, as quick and sly as ever, jerked back. As he slid across the table, Dent's hands ended up falling onto Eric's shirt rather than his neck.

That was fine; he'd just grab that instead.

So it was with Harvey clutching his shirt and Eric staggering off his stool that they fell off onto the tiled floor of the mess hall (in truth, though, it was more like the backwards force of Eric's staggering pulled Harvey _across_ the table and then _his_ weight pulled Eric down onto the floor with him, as Harvey's feet caught on the bars of the stools and spilled him forward).

They rolled there for a second, and then Harvey scurried across the floor, growling like a rabid dog.

Eric had begun to pick himself up but he fell down right away, back on his butt to get out of the way of Dent's grasp.

That did him no good, though. Dent just caught him by the collar mid-fall and jerked him back up on his feet.

Then he hooked his thumbs and jabbed them into Eric's eyes as hard as he could.

And Eric promptly wailed like a police siren. His hands, they failed out and then caught Harvey's forearms, clutching them as hard as he could. But that was useless, too; Harvey just pressed on, like kid's finger against a particularly stubborn bubble of packing warp; wanting, _needing_ , it to pop.

Then, Eric hands slipped off his arms, failed briefly again, and came back with a desperate slap to Harvey's face. To _both_ of his faces. Pain exploded in the raw meat, in the wrinkles and patches of burnt and blistered skin.

But what Harvey had done to Eric at this point was worse than what Eric had done to Harvey-he had just slapped him, after all—and Dent was able to come back after the initial shock as Eric held his onto his own face.

Yeah, where _were_ the guards?

I'd like to know that, too.

Anyways, Harvey came back as Eric held his eyes and swung at him. It connected with his jaw. Eric _umphfed_ and then fell against the table behind him. That's when his hand caught the ladleful of the Molten Monstrosity on someone's tray. It's liquid, yeah, but there's some solid chunks—the red maggots, I called them—and when you toss it at someone, of course some liquid is gonna spray out in a little disgusting rooster-tail. So that's what Eric did, on impulse, throwing it with all his might.

It's wasn't so much the force that drove Harvey backward as it was anything at all touching the left side of that face. Again, pain exploded, and again, Harvey's hand went to the spot to inspect the damage as the stuff smacked right into him.

And Eric used the opportunity to throw the whole tray, tossing it more like a Frisbee than anything. It hit Harvey in the hand holding his face and he almost fell completely down this time, as he backed up again.

Then… well...

Then Harvey just tore his hand away from his face, ignoring the pain, ignoring everything, and charged him. Full-tilt, head down, like a bull, not thinking, just plowing forward. Eric tried to prepare himself and plant his feet, but they both went flying onto the other table, anyway; Eric was a little toothpick of a guy, after all; five-eleven feet high and a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet.

Trays skidded and tumbled and slid as they rolled off the table and then back onto the floor again, on the other side.

Harvey came out on top of Eric.

In a clumsy, sprawling free-fall, did he come out on top.

But he picked himself up without a second to spare and dropped right down to his knees, each knee on the other side of the bully's torso.

And that's when he started pummeling.

Over and over and over; his fists just hammered against Eric's arms—he had raised them to protect his face. It stayed like that for a few moments, Harvey's rising fists coming down and striking Eric's bony forearms; Eric grunting and yelping and shouting, Harvey's growl turned up to an ongoing, deep roar now. In those few moments, everything in Harvey's ears, except his bellowing cry of rage, was muffled, as if the world had been covered in medical gauze; everything in his peripheral vision was a bright, hot red. His blood was boiling, his blood was thumping. Everything was much too fast for thoughts. Like a crack of white lighting in a black sky, it was simply there where soon later it would not be. Like an eruption, it simply happened.

It simply rolled off and burned.

Harvey was moving his fists down to Eric's ribs and stomach, jabbing and trip-hammering his curled-up knuckles like a boxer throwing a moving shoeshine, when, somewhere in the muffled red, there's a heavy thump and a flash of hot pain.

Then blackness—it's a blackness so sudden and complete that it could have been caused by someone blowing out of a matchstick in a catacomb.

It was a guard's baton.

A guard finally breaking things up.

Finally intervening.

Harvey had been knocked out. He didn't stick around to file a safety complaint, though. He only keeled over to the side, lifeless as a crash dummy, and his head hit the ceramic tiles of the floor with a soft _bonk_. He landed on the bad side; the burnt side of his face. Since he had lost all control in the eye on that side, as he was blacking out, it looked like he was tipping a very quick, very forced wink with the right one… and then forgetting to open that eye again as he fell over.

He was taken by a gurney to the isolation ward; it's this big, windowless rectangle of white-walls and black-and-gray tiles, with two rows of a dozen or so iron-framed beds on either side. It's used for the injured and the aggressive.

Since he was both—and much more of the latter than the former—Harvey was strapped in the bed farthest away from the front door.

He was then doped up with Valium; two milligrams of the stuff pumped into the fleshy side of his hip every four hours, intramuscularly, with a syringe. He was secluded from the other inmates (there were only two others: one of them Eric, one of them a man in his mid-forties who had developed intestinal damage by swallowing the bishop of the chess board in the rec room) by a closed, U-shaped ring of curtain hanging on a rod above the bed.

He would alternate from being passed out there for three of the four hours, then would start to stir right around the time they came to pump him full of sedative again; he was all fogged up and glossy-eyed and muttering nonsense during these times.

Then he'd ease back and fall asleep again.

And lather, rinse, and repeat.

But then, right around two in the morning, when he was starting to stir again, there was the nurse.

That goddamn nurse.

She wore her hair—which was a beautiful, earthen black-brown—short and tied back in a pert little bun. She wore an eight-button, white nurse's scrub-dress, one of those that bells out at the midriff and then cuts off at the shins; you can be sure that it left enough of her legs to have garnered her a couple (or a thousand) cat-calls if she had walked down the street like that. The dress had two lower pockets, each on her thighs. A couple of pens were clipped onto the right fold; a pair of forceps, some small packets of ointment, and some Band-Aids had been stuffed into the other.

She slipped in through the curtain's ring, tugged the fabric back into place behind her to give them some privacy, and then turned to Harvey.

He laid supine on the bed, restrained at the wrists and ankles and chest by the brown leather straps they use in here. His head was rocking gently right and left, back and forth, a deep groan creaking out of his mouth like a pressed floorboard in a haunted house. Slowly, languidly, his eyes opened to her smiling face.

To him, at first, she looked like an incoherent white blot. Then she moved to him and things started coming into focus. The décolleté of her dress, the narrow, spreading line of her cleavage as she leaned over him to check his forehead with the back of her hand, her breasts against the cotton of her dress, the round, creamy curves of her face, her head so large, like an oddly beautiful caricature…

It was more than just the POV shots you see on movies and TV when the main hero wakes up after a knock to the head.

It was something he had seen in his real _life_ before.

It was like when Gilda would lean over him in bed after laying him down at night, after one of his fits…or on the couch after one of his fits… or in the hospital after the biggest fit of all… or after the acid accident.

All those times, Gilda had nursed him, Gilda had run her long, delicate fingers down his face, had worked on him, had worked on _healing_ him.

"Gilda?" he whispered to the nurse now, "That you?"

She brushed his hair out of his good eye. They were alone in the enclosure of the curtain. "No, sweetie," she whispered back, "Not Gilda. A messenger."

"Of what?"

She smiled—it made her face all the more beautiful. "Of the word to the wise to keep your powder dry. Of the hot tip to be _ready_."

He groaned again, and turned his head from her. "Ready for what?"

But the nurse hadn't answered that; she had just walked away to the stand on the other side of the bed.

"Gilda, you're not making any sense," he called after her, "Where am I?"

He had closed his eyes, the blackness returning momentarily, but he could still understand what she was doing; he could hear the clatter of medical utensils on the steel tray on the stand, could hear the elastic of her latex gloves stretch over her hands and then snap back up into place.

And as she was getting his dosage ready, clattering away, she was saying, very causally:

"Jake was sexually frustrated with his wife Caroline. They had been married for a good two and half years, give or take, and still they had never had sex. She was a prude; she just despised the whole act, found it repulsive and demeaning and unnecessary. He tried a great many times to engage with her on the topic, but she refused to talk about it; that's how gross it was for her."

Then, the nurse was pulling back the cut in the hip of his hospital gown, pressing the needle against his skin, pulling back the plunger, pressing the plunger back into the Valium-full capsule of the syringe with a careful, slow thumb. "Then one day," she said to him as she did this, "Caroline falls asleep on the beach out by their house and suffers severe burns on seventy percent of her body."—Harvey groaned at the piercing burn of the injection and tried to speak, but she went on over him—"Jake takes her to the doctor and after some tests, takes her home. She's bedridden; every time she moves, she cries out in pain. He tires all the lotions and creams in the world, it seems, to alleviate her pain: Aloe Vera, Calendula, Petroleum Jelly, you name it. He goes through bottle after bottle, tub after tub, and still no use: she _still_ cries out and begs for the pain to go away."

The nurse took the needle out and flipped back Harvey's gown with a flick of the wrist. She put a soft hand on his hip… then turned and set the needle back on the tray.

She slipped off her gloves. She put them on the tray. She sat down on his bed, her waist pressing against his ram-rod-straight legs. In that moment, Harvey's blurry mind begged her to just lay down on his chest, with her hands spreading over his shirt, her head on his sternum, the rest of her body curling up against him. In that moment, his blurry mind just wished she'd lie with him on that bed.

"He comes back into her room at half past eleven," she went on with the story, instead of doing that, "He has a handful of a brand-new lotion that he's never tried before. Caroline wakes up as he's rubbing her down, and she turns over to him in bed, facing him. 'No, Jake,' she says, 'I don't want that tonight. Not again. You know it doesn't even _work_ ; I 've _told_ you it doesn't even _begin_ to take the pain away. No, tonight there's only one thing I want from you—

But by then Harvey had started get a little kvetched; Gilda wasn't making any sense, she had just given him a shot with a syringe for no apparent reason, and now she wouldn't even stop talking and rest next to him like she normally did during these tough, painful times.

And why was she dressed up like they were doing foreplay?

"Why are you joking around, Gilda?" he asked her, in a stern voice, "This is serious—I'm really hurt here."

Then she did something most infuriating.

She _shrugged_.

"You'll heal," she said, as she shrugged. She smiled again. "And after you do, you should talk to Jervis, whenever you see him. Tell him you got the invite, and he'll tell you the rest. Here's a reminder."

She wrapped her long, delicate fingers around his arm and brought out his hand to her lap. A pen came out of the left pocket of her scrub-dress and she clicked off the cap. The feel of the pen on his palm was strangely pleasant—almost satisfying in its light, tingling scrawl.

"Lick it off when you wake up," she said as she wrote. Then she nodded to herself. "I'll write that down for you, too."

Slowly, gently, she put back his hand on the bed at his side and replaced the pen in her pocket.

"There you go."

Then she patted his leg, got up... and started for the curtain.

Harvey held out a tired, confused hand. "Wait, honey, where're you going?"

She turned, hand on curtain. "To do my job. I _do_ have one besides delivering messages to doped-up crazy men, you know. I might not be doing it for much longer, I know that, but until then…" she shrugged "…I've got bills to pay."

"Well," Harvey muttered and shifted in his straps, trying to get comfortable, "at least tell me what happened to the married couple."

In his foggy, deluded state, Harvey was actually quite interested in finding this out.

"Oh, yeah," she said, placing a finger on her chin, "That. So, anyways, like I was saying, Jake's wife, she turns to him in bed one night as he's rubbing down her burns, and says, 'No, Jake, I don't want that tonight. Not again. You know it doesn't even _work_ ; I 've _told_ you it doesn't even _begin_ to take the pain away. No, tonight there's only one thing I want from you.

"He looks up at her, surprised and hopeful. 'What is it, honey?' he says. 'What do you need? I'll do anything.'

"'I only need _you_ , Jake,' she answers, 'I'm ready. I'm finally ready for _you_. I'm finally ready to do _it_. I don't even care if it hurts my burns, as long as it gives me some pleasure. You can do whatever you want to me, too, as long as I can feel somewhat ok again. Tonight, I want you to take me. Tonight, Jake, I want you all over me!'"

'For awhile, he just looks at her. Then he sort of frowns, holds out his hands, which are covered with the brand-new lotion, and says, 'I already am.'"

It took awhile for Harvey to process this, his eyes staring up at the ceiling of the isolation ward; the nurse grinned expectedly as his mind wrapped around it.

Then he understood it and found that, yeah, he could chuckle at that.

"Oh god," he said, _through_ his chuckles, "Gilda, honey, that's disgusting."

The nurse considered, then nodded. "That's very true. It''s also hilarious. Or, at least, _he_ thinks so. And he should, too—he came up with it, after all."

Harvey stopped chuckling, turned his head, and sighed. "There you go again, talking nonsense. What are you saying, Gilda? Who's he?"

Then the nurse looked worried, her mouth turning down and her head tilting to the side. "Wow, you must've hit your head really hard, huh, sweetie?"

She held up her palm.

"Here let me help: who's the one guy you know who can come up with a joke like that? A _disgusting_ , _hilarious_ joke like that?"

"Well," Harvey said, "I know a couple, but I see what you're getting at. And again, I say you've fallen off your rocker, dear." His tone dropped, growing grave and certain. He turned and locked her into an assertive gaze. "Gilda, he's dead."

"Yes, Mr. Dent," the nurse replied. _Her_ tone was very serious all of the sudden, too. "Yes, he is. And how many times has he been dead before, do you figure?"

"No," Harvey said, unable to believe it.

"Yes," the nurse said, already knowing it.

" _No_ ," Harvey pressed.

" _Yes_ ," the nurse pressed harder.

Then Harvey sighed again, and closed his eyes. In all likely-hood, she was probably right. "Well, what is it then?" He asked. "What's he going to do _this_ time?"

The nurse shrugged.

"End it."

"End what, Gilda?"

"End of everything, Mr. Dent." Again, she smiled. "He's going to end _everything_."

She was halfway out of the curtain-ring, looking over her shoulder at him, when she said, "And you're invited to come watch."

Then she disappeared, smiling and slipping away like the assistant to a magician at a magic show, one who's part is done and who is now going backstage. The flap of curtain fell back into place, and Harvey was all alone. Hurting faintly, his face aching like a loose tooth but not throbbing like it had before—actually now the pain was receding, so that was good—and feeling like there wasn't really a bed underneath him, but more of a cloud, bobbing and drifting slowly along a light, healthy-blue sky, he was all alone.

But in his head, he was with Gilda.

In his head, he was seeing a suede-black dance shoe— _his_ dance shoe—shuffle and sweep over the shiny parquet of the dance studio's floor; seeing Gilda's Aris Allen heels clip-clop across the same; first stepping, then _stamping,_ moving faster and faster. He saw his grin—a big, stupid grin, it was—as they were _finally_ picking things up, finally feeling it out, finally swinging, finally _being_.

 _The end of everything_ , he thought, seeing all this. _Maybe that's not so bad. Maybe in the end… not so bad. Maybe I'll even come watch. Or maybe I'll just flip for it. Probably I'll decide myself. Probably I'll just come because it_ feels _right. Shit, can I do that? Can I deny the coin? Can_ I _choose?"_

He was on the verge of sleep, his head slumping to the side like a seizure victim in slow-motion, and when he said "Why not?' he said it was in a sort of primitive grumble into his pillow.

Then he slept, and after awhile, he snored.

But he didn't dream.

Man, look at the time!

I've bent your ear for a lot more than twenty minutes.

Gosh, I'm sorry.

Hey, you should be getting back to your business.

But come back when you can, ok? I have a lot more to tell. Since there's five main characters of this story—but it's not really a story because it really happened, and the characters are real people—I'll make it a multiple perspective sort of deal, alright? Jump between their lives and all that.

Three guys, two girls.

Each one sick and confused in his or her own way.

I care a lot about them, too.

So, again, I won't leave anything out.

You'll see.

Alright.

I'll catch you later.


End file.
